Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Australian Financial Review, $30 trillion to provide electricity to people who already have electricity is a greater investment opportunity than the internet.
Climate change ‘biggest investment opportunity since the internet’
An estimated $41 trillion is required to decarbonise the planet, giving investors the chance to profit from a growing mega-trend.
Alex Gluyas
Markets Reporter
Sep 1, 2021 – 5.00amA growing chorus in the investment community is warning that investors need to climate-proof their portfolios or risk missing out on potentially overlooked returns offered by the global transition to a zero-carbon economy.
This comes amid an accelerating urgency by many overseas governments to implement measures aimed at achieving net zero emissions by 2050. This is to avoid reaching the critical 1.5-degree tipping point which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says at current rates could occur as early as next decade.
Australia remains with the same commitment made in 2015 under then prime minister Tony Abbott – to be 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
The investment required to decarbonise the planet is estimated to be more than $US30 trillion ($41.2 trillion), presenting investors with a rare opportunity to invest in companies that will be involved in the race to net zero.
“Climate change is the next major mega-trend, and we believe it represents the biggest investment opportunity since the internet,” says portfolio manager at Munro Partners James Tsinidis.
“We’re just at the beginning of the next big S-curve, a massive and sustainable decades-long growth trend.”
…
Read more: https://www.afr.com/wealth/personal-finance/climate-change-biggest-investment-opportunity-since-the-internet-20210826-p58m4w
Leaving aside the in my opinion suspect $30 trillion estimate (no mention of grid battery backup storage, which adds at least $50 trillion to that figure by my calculations), there seems very little evidence people will put up with this magnitude of expenditure worked into their energy bills or taxes, for a commodity they already have access to.
In fact quite the opposite, when you consider the Yellow Vest protests in Europe, which started as opposition to French efforts to introduce a climate fuel tax, or surveys showing how few people are willing to pay for climate action.
Return on investment for renewables is utterly dependent on fickle political commitment to funding the boondoggle. As the Spanish government’s retrospective solar tariff cut demonstrated, when governments run out of money, keeping faith with their renewable energy commitments is not at the top of their list of priorities. And there are a lot of reasons to be concerned that Western governments will run short of money over the next 30 years.
Occasionally, reality bites
“ Australia ends zero-Covid policy because it is ‘not sustainable’” – Wales Online
The UK is pushing the banning of gas boilers, and prices have just gone up again
There are going to be quite a few holes in the Treasury where the taxes used to be
Utter madness
Maybe. The government have just introduced the E10 petrol, increasing the maximum amount of bioethanol from 5% to 10%. Not a move that I would necessarily have expected if they were going all out to ban petrol and gas – it’s sending slightly mixed signals. We may see a bit of backtracking after the COP26 shitfest is over and done with.
Maybe?
No fuel duty/VAT is going to make a helluva a hole on its own.
Think about it…. everybody uses electricity, not just wealthy Tesla owners.
Ok. Scenario B (the backtracking) – they don’t ban fuels, just replace them all with 10% biofuels (as older cars get replaced), whilst making urban centre’s into emissions-free zones (like London’s LEZ). They can keep the majority of the fuel tax, argue that they’re doing something about t’envi’munt, argue that they’re curbing urban pollution, etc. My money isn’t necessarily on this scenario per se, but I do think we’ll see some backtracking going on a little way down the line.
It is a ponzi scheme, so get in and get out before the bubble bursts.
In Britain reality will bite after COP. Until then Johnson will persist with his pose as the world leader in decarbonization but after that he will have to cope with the political backlash against the cost and the worldwide collapse of power systems that led the way to disaster like Germany, South Australia and California.
See here for the South Australian failure.
The SA failure.
The UK already has a massive amount of renewable electricity, plus, for example, 3 times as much offshore wind in the building/approved pipeline as already operates…
This is a ‘supertanker’ of effort and even if there was the political will, you aren’t going to see it turned around…
I see that griff is still pushing the having government require something, proves that it works.
As I type wind plus solar are providing about 16% of the total load in the UK.
And it is easy to turn a supertanker round to go the other way. If you put the rudder hard over it will turn round in about 3 times the lentgh of the ship, although the engineers will get upset. Slowing it down while mainaing the same direction is a different thing altogether.
But you are right about the political will not being there.
length
Griff, according to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, wind and solar provided 3.47% of the total primary energy use in Britain in 2019.
griff has two tricks that he uses interchangeably. He either uses direct faceplate capacity and assumes that all plants produce power 100% of the time.
Or he scours the daily records, finds the one 5 minute stretch during the year when renewables are going flat out while everything else is throttled back, and assumes that renewables are capable of this percentage for the entire year.
Griff dosn’t know the difference between electricity use in Britain and the total energy use. The electricity grid makes up only about 20% of the total energy used in Britain. Griff seems to assume it will be easy to convert all energy use into electricity. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, currently there is no feasible way to power ships and planes by electricity. Replacing gas boilers in British homes promises to be an absolute nightmare. Electric cars and trucks is another disaster waiting to happen.
And where is all this baseload electricity going to come from? It certainly won’t be wind or solar. The only possible way to generate enough zero carbon reliable electricity is to build a hundred nuclear power plants. Best of luck with that.
I must admit though, that I learn quite a lot about the actual status of things from the response comments to Griff’s inane posts here.
So there is that . . .
So do I!
A lot of the throwdowns make me laugh, too.
It’s nice that masochists can find paid employment.
And that’s about ALL it will ever be able to produce! At an ever increasing cost!
Griff….😩
Buddy you do not get it.
And it’s currently supplying 3GW or 8% of demand whereas gas is supplying 15.5GW or 45% of demand.
Yes Griffy, the figures are very telling. The UK has over 300 wind farm projects in the planning pipeline and 15 that have received permission to build. That’s on top of the 32 wind farms that have been installed. So from that we can state that a – we have half as many in the planned build pipeline as have been built, not 3 times. b – the political will appears to be in favour of rejecting far more projects than are approved.
I keep having to repeat myself with you but here goes – you have a disconnect from reality – what you post is delusional, completely unsupported by facts or truth, and if you are unable to see that, then you need serious professional help.
Not that I care about turbines, or want to help Griff, but more to steal his chance to comment, that I ask how do the figures compare on a GW basis? I’m sure the future wind farms are planned to be much larger than the ones in the past, and maybe that’s where the 3X figure comes in.
Some of the wind farms are bigger – mostly the offshore ones as the onshore farms are often constrained by the land available. It’s also made more complicated by the fact that some of the ‘new builds’ are actually small extensions to existing wind farms. I haven’t done an analysis on number of installed turbines vs number of planned turbines (or even the number of turbines in proposed but unplanned as yet projects) but I think the numbers will be roughly in agreement. The UK doesn’t have the onshore land requirements to support the huge wind farms that you see in other countries – ours are generally on the small side by comparison, so the 3x idea is pretty ridiculous to start with, even taking into account such offshore wind farms that can be built.
Let griffter’s UK experiment continue…it will produce high prices and blackouts….AN EXAMPLE NOT TO FOLLOW….FIGHT BACK! JOIN ZERO WINDMILLS & SOLAR PANELS NOW!
“AN EXAMPLE NOT TO FOLLOW”
Has the ever deterred left leaning politicians?
Unfortunately the offshore system doesn’t have the life as the on shore. The blades go off faster and the mechanics also have a shorter life span. Just face it electricity is going to be a major expense in future. Especially when we are all forced to have electric heat as out sole source of heat. More people will be dieing from the cold cause they can’t afford to heat their homes.
let’s hope the blackouts take Griff’s nonsensical crap offline for good.
Why doesn’t he power his dumbass house/flat/caravan/squat with 100% renewables if he thinks it’s so great?
that would at least mean he will be offline semi permanently & stop to “emmerder” people here who clearly have more than his 2 brain cells…like AOC or Princess nut-nut.
Thanks for giving me another chance to publish real data – 01/09/21 @ 21:15
You never respond though, Griff, mate
It’s ok Griff, it doesn’t have to be turned around, in 20 years or even less all the current turbines and panels will be junk, and doubtlelessly be replaced with natural gas plants.
Less. 1% will go up in flames, the others will start decaying after about 5 years – just after the spares run out and the manufacturer ceases production of that model, they will then get fewer and fewer by the year until at about 15 years in you’ve got less than 5% of what you started with. Then you either decommission the entire lot or declare bankruptcy and run away with whatever you can pocket from the safe.
Take the money from the evil coal burners and give it to us – the glorious windmill people.
It’s the good fight ya know….
Already won then in the UK, where 2 of the last 3 coal plants close in 2022 and coal only supplies 2% of electricity.
What is already won?
Windmills (and solar power if you like) replacing all forms of carbon-based energy?
And where wind is currently supplying 4 times as much.
Still less than 10% of our current usage though (no pun intended).
The winner is gas.
Google gas….. btw a brand new coal mine in UK is expected to supply coal to Turkey for steel making. Really hard to make steel without coal👌
We rely on a lot of power from Europe.
Bully for the UK. But, China Is Planning to Build 43 New Coal-Fired Power Plants
As usual, giffie focus on the wrong thing, completely.
Now tell us how much it cost to install all of that non-functioning wind equipment, giffiepoo?!
Then we can tell you how many coal/oil/LPG fired generators could have been installed to supply extremely cheap power.
Plus how many decades those fossil fueled generators would run.
Wind and solar, excessively costly, land devouring and destroying inefficient technologies that last less than 25 years.
No excuse, giffie. No excuse for wasting all of those funds and all of that land for bird and bat destroying ugly monstrosities.
How do you decarbonise a carbon based planet?
Using the most effective post-modern tool available
Doublethink
It reminds me about the joke about four Catholic Nuns driving from Sydney to their Far West NSW home with an antique chamber pot they discovered while visiting Sydney and were given permission to take home with them. Their car ran out of petrol some distance from the nearest town and fuel supply, so two of them took the chamber pot and hitched a ride there and back to buy petrol.
As the four of them stood alongside the car petrol tank filler tube trying to pour the petrol in two ministers of another religion drove past, the driver said to the passenger “did you see those Nuns?”, the passenger acknowledged that he had and replied “you might not agree with their religion but you must admire their faith”.
Just like climate hoax fanatics wanting to decarbonise a carbon based planet?
There must be a super bomb that could wipe put all carbon on Earth, then the planet really will truly be free, & very, very, very, …………….dead!!!
The lunatics have truly taken over the asylum!!! If only they could hear/smell what they’re shovelling!!!
This arm of the Milky Way Galaxy is carbon based and occurs in solid, liquid, gas and plasma formats. Anyone who has studied physics and chemistry has some understanding of what this represents in the real world.
Very easily. You get rid of all humans and animals
First. That nasty CO2 they exhale. Around 700,000 tonnes of CO2 per day is exhaled by humans alone😳
It dose seem a bit crazy for carbon based life forms to throw around the term “decarbonize”.
Assuming a cost of USD25 per acre to supply and spread crushed Basalt over the existing farmland AND existing deserts (i.e 20% of Earth’s total area = 2e14 square metres)..
I reckon a figure of 1.25 Trillion USD (one thousand two hundred and fifty billion) would:
It would then not be *just* England that was a Green & Pleasant Land
Sadly England ain’t those things anymore. The 20 year trend for green & pleasant western side is a cooling trend , the dry ‘other side’ is warming and rapidly turning into an all out dust-bowl.
The inhabitants, exemplified by the socially & politically dysfunctional, financially incontinent, brain-dead alcoholic, sugar-eating, obese, diabetic and incompetent buffoon that is: Boris Johnson are becoming increasingly less-than-pleasant
i.e. lazy, selfish, hypocritical, finger-wagging and buck-passing Puritans whose Daily Highlight comprises 6 hours of self-inflicted brain-washing while crashed-out in front of a TV
Don’t laugh, except Biden-voters who may laugh, nervously.
missed the eidt = edit 4 Fat Fingers. i.e. 20% of Earth – 1E14 square metres
Your choice: Half the cost or double the rate you’re throwing basalt around. I assumed 5 tonnes per acre and $$$ based on what I used to pay, per tonne, for agricultural-grade crushed Limestone.
Or, keep the lower 5 tonne rate and toss some old windmills into the water to ‘Help The Fishes’
Iron makes things green and if you’ve ever been on a golf course, you should know that.
If not, have a craic with the groundsman/green-keeper
Fish Oil is already proven help people to displace sugar from their diet and thus kick their Sugar Habit
No, its not the Omega 3 Oil/acids as claimed. Fish Oil Omegas are the wrong (16C) chain length and we simply burn them for energy.
If we need Omega Oil, we make our own (18C chain-length) omegas BUT, we need fat in our diet of that chain-length as raw material and plants/fishes don’t make that sort/quality of fat.
“Looks like Carbon Insanity” should be added to the Psychiatrists list of untreatable of mental conditions.
If their professional associations are anything to go by, psychiatrists already have carbon insanity. I did find one was prepared to allow a young climate sufferer access to a therapy group, but he has gone back to another branch of medicine.
As a practitioner or as a patient? sarc
People won’t put up with it?
Well it isn’t as if we haven’t started yet, is it?
For example UK 42% renewable electricity, coal plants near close; Germany 51% renewable; Spain 42% renewable… new coal cancelled across the EU…
No mass protest so far…
Once again, when griff decides to start making up numbers, he goes all out.
A man jumped off the roof of a 100-story building. As he passed the 4th floor he could be heard saying, “Nothing’s happened yet!”
“So far, not so bad!”
Do you have gas central heating or a heat pump, griff?
Thought so
That’s because the lights haven’t gone out……..yet, but they will do, & all that squandered natural gas being burnt for nothing other than to provide reliable back-up generation when the sun stops shining & the wind stops blowing!!!
“German Failure on the Road to a Renewable FutureIn 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the country was turning away from nuclear energy in favor of a renewable future. Since then, however, progress has been limited. Berlin has wasted billions of euros and resistance is mounting”
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-on-the-road-to-a-renewable-future-a-1266586.html
Except for the mass protests in Loch Ness, Glenurquhart, Powys, Surrey and other home counties. Mass protests have blocked over 50% of all wind farm plans so far and the numbers are rising. People don’t want these things.
Sorry, these are for UK wind farms. Not sure about elsewhere although I noticed in passing that protests in Hawaii have stopped all new wind farm plans.
And a quick search shows similar mass protests in Ireland, Germany, France and Sweden, to name but a few. People are pushing back against wind farms.
Keep it up Griff.
We all love being wound up by you. Don’t know how you keep it though. Manipulating figures which have already been manipulated must be difficult. Let the fun continue.
It’s actually easier to manipulate figures that have already been manipulated. The more you do it, the easier it gets, because they get more flexible with practice.
Whilst Germany may have reached 51% renewable in 2020 you neglected to mention that it still gets 23.7% from coal of which 16.2% is from lignite, the dirtiest form of coal for power production.
You also ignore that the share of natural gas, which was 16.1% in 2020, is likely to increase once Nordstream 2 comes online.
Stats from the official ‘Gross Electricity Production in Germany’
Western politicians are completely out of step with their electorate over the push to net zero. So far they’ve managed to get away with it because the costs of achieving net zero have been hidden in an avalanche of weasel words.
We now have a situation in the UK where “the chickens are coming home to roost” and these costs can no longer be hidden. The latest fiasco, over heat pumps, is almost certainly going to be sweetened with a £4,000 government subsidy towards the costs of converting from a gas boiler to a heat pump.
What the politicians have kept hidden, however, is that existing heating installations won’t work with a heat pump. When householders realise this there will be an almighty explosion of anger, not just because of the costs but also the upheaval required to install new systems that will work with heat pumps. On top of that people will have to use immersion heaters for domestic hot water requirements as heat pumps aren’t very good for high temperature needs.
Add to all of this the fact that the majority of people in the UK can’t afford an EV, to say nothing of the lack of charging points and there’s only one way this is going to end up: an economic disaster.
Interestingly, good old Greta has just condemned the Scots for failing to do enough despite Nicola Sturgeon bringing the Green Party into her Government, which of course she’s done for political reasons in her bid for yet another independence referendum.
None of this is going to end well. A lot of people are going to be left with huge costs, which they can’t afford; and what exactly will this achieve? In effect, nothing.
A lot of people are going to be left with huge costs, which they can’t afford; and what exactly will this achieve?
Control.
$30 TRILLION needed to decarbonize the entire planet?
Bull manure, it would be a lot more.
Here is an excerpt of my article
WORLD AND US PRIMARY ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND CAPITAL COST
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/world-total-energy-consumption
World energy consumption is projected to increase to 736 quads in 2040 from 575 quads in 2015, an increase of 28%, according to the US Energy Information Administration, EIA.
See URL and click on PPT to access data, click on to page 4 of PowerPoint
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/
Most of this growth is expected to come from countries not in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, and especially from countries where demand is driven by strong economic growth, particularly in Asia.
Non-OECD Asia, which includes China and India, accounted for more than 60% of the world’s total increase in energy consumption from 2015 through 2040.
PARIS AGREEMENTS
China, India, and other developing Asian countries, and Africa, and Middle and South America, need to use low-cost energy, such as coal, to be competitive. They would not have signed up for “Paris”, if they had not been allowed to be more or less exempt from the Paris agreements
Obama agreed to commit the US to the Paris agreements, i.e., be subject to its financial and other obligations for decades.
However, he never submitted the commitment to the US Senate for ratification, as required by the US Constitution.
Trump rescinded the commitment. It became effective 3 years later, one day after the US presidential elections on November 3, 2020.
If the US had not left “Paris”, a UN Council likely would have determined a level of renewable energy, RE, spending, say $500 billion/y, for distributing to various poorer countries by UN bureaucrats.
The Council would have assessed OECD members, likely in proportion to their GDPs.
The US and Europe would have been assessed at 100 to 150 billion dollars/y each.
The non-OECD countries likely would continue to be more or less exempt from paying for the Paris agreements.
SUMMARY OF CAPITAL EXPENDITURES FOR THE WORLD AND US
The analysis includes two scenarios: 1) 50% RE by 2050, and 2) 100% RE by 2050.
The CAPEX values exclude a great many items related to transforming the world economy to a low-carbon mode. See next section.
50% RE by 2050
World CAPEX for RE were $2,652.2 billion for 2010-2019, 10 years
World CAPEX for RE were $282.2 billion in 2019.
World CAPEX for RE would be $24,781 billion for 2019 – 2050, 32 years; compound growth 5.76%/y
US CAPEX for RE were $494.5 billion for 2010 – 2019, 10 years.
US CAPEX for RE were $59 billion in 2019.
US CAPEX for RE would be $7,233 billion for 2019 – 2050, 32 years; compound growth 8.81%/y
100% RE by 2050
World CAPEX for RE were $2,652.2 billion for 2010-2019, 10 years
World CAPEX for RE were $282.2 billion in 2019.
World CAPEX for RE would be $60,987 billion for 2019 – 2050, 32 years; compound growth 10.08%/y
US CAPEX for RE were $494.5 billion for 2010 – 2019, 10 years.
US CAPEX for RE were $59 billion in 2019.
US CAPEX for RE would be $16,988 billion for 2019 – 2050, 32 years; compound growth 13.42%/y
SUMMARY OF “BIG-PICTURE” CAPEX FOR THE WORLD AND THE US
World More-Inclusive CAPEX
The above CAPEX numbers relate to having 50% RE, or 100% RE, in the primary energy mix by 2050, which represents a very narrow area of “fighting climate change”. See Appendix for definitions of source, primary and upstream energy.
This report, prepared by two financial services organizations, estimates the world more-inclusive CAPEX at $100 trillion to $150 trillion, over the next 30 years, about $3 trillion to $5 trillion per year
https://www.investmentexecutive.com/news/research-and-markets/funding-the-fight-against-global-warming/
NOTE: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that an average of $3.5 trillion per year will be needed just in energy investments between 2016 and 2050 to achieve the 1.5-degree target.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-must-halve-emissions-galvanize-global-climate-action-un-chief-2021-04-19/
US More-Inclusive CAPEX
The ratio of World CAPEX for RE / US CAPEX for RE = 16,988/60,987 = 0.279
A more-inclusive US CAPEX could be $27.9 trillion to $41.8 trillion
The US CAPEX could be less, because, at present, the world is adding a quad of RE at about $58.95 billion, compare to the US at about $102.78 billion.
It is unclear what accounts for the large difference.
Part of it may be due to differences of accounting methods among countries.
NOTE: The CAPEX numbers exclude costs for replacements of shorter-life systems, such as EVs, heat-pumps, batteries, wind-turbines, etc., during these 30 years. For comparison:
Hydro plants have long lives, about 100 years.
Nuclear plants about 60 years
Coal and gas-turbine plants about 40 years
Wind turbine systems about 20 years
Solar systems about 25 years
Battery systems about 15 years
Very small changes in requirements assumptions have a big impact. For example, how much battery backup do you need? Battery backup costs around $10 trillion per day of backup capacity. So do you need one day? Five days? Fifty days?
Then you have the impact on cost of driving up demand for scarce commodities, if you start factoring that in the numbers really blow up.
$10 Trillion per day of backup. For what country?
For the world. Only a very rough calculation. Also my figures don’t take into account the energy cost of sustaining all the renewable infrastructure, when you try to factor that in you likely have a runaway exponential, in which energy cost of maintenance can never be satisfied by the energy produced by stabilised renewable grids.
My numbers are for the well-known, more obvious items.
When batteries become a big factor, because of the vagaries of wind and solar, all hell will break loose regarding costs.
There is NO FUTURE without nuclear, as will be obvious, even to IDIOT politicians.
China and Russia and South Korea have up-to-date nuclear infrastructures to “go nuclear”
Probably should count the $$$$s needed to start mining asteroids for the necessary rare metals.
I can’t wait to see the first ‘carbon-free’ space launch!
$30 Trillion wouldn’t even cover the US, much less the whole planet.
The estimated cost of net zero carbon to New Zealand is 5 trillion dollars. Extrapolating that to the entire world gives a figure of a quadrillion dollars.
https://nypost.com/2019/12/08/reality-check-drive-for-rapid-net-zero-emissions-a-guaranteed-loser/
quadrillion dollars.
They say there’s an asteroid for that
Even the figure of a quadrillion dollars is almost certainly a gross underestimate. For example, this figure excludes the cost of Africa’s coming industrialisation. If the whole world reached the same level of development as New Zealand, the cost would be 10 quadrillion dollars.
Don’t worry. The pols will just print that 10 quadrillion dollars.
–
–
Printing press futures are UP!
When extrapolating, did you account for the fact that few countries have as much hydro resources as New Zealand does?
Mark, that’s a good point. It looks as if my estimate is probably too low. But what’s a quadrillion more? The cost of net zero carbon targets is so astronomical that nobody can afford them. What’s more, the cost estimates assume that there is a technology fix for electric planes, ships and trucks. The net zero carbon targets look utterly impossible to achieve.
Did you account your the fact that you need 4x existing reliable capacity for a whole day of unreliable generation, add 4x existing reliable capacity for batteries, double all of that because of EVs, maybe triple it to replace gas heating, then multiply it ALL by the number of days you might get no unreliable generation?
My estimate is 4x3x5=60x
Ox carts might substitute for trucks.
Decarbonize the planet…. umm, how? Plants are carbon-based. Don’t these twits like plants? Plants require CO2 to exist. Aren’t all those ecohippies and GNDers dependent on plants for sustenance?
Aimals are carbon-based, too, so are they going to get rid of animals? Won’t that throw off the entire biological cycle?
The people who want to decarbonize the planet are more interested in how much money they can winkle out of taxpayers than anything else.
They aren’t fooling anyone but themselves. I think they deserve their very own planet: perhaps Mars will do.
These twits gauge their compassion for a species by how cuddly and intelligent they estimate it to be
Killing plants is no big deal even though life is…. life
Life is life and plants react in much the same way as animals, albeit more slowly. Those vegans and vegetarians should be shown the research of plants screaming when they’re pulled out of the ground, plants reacting to stimuli and communicating with each other. As you say quite rightly – life is life, and very much the same.
I sometimes wonder, if you and others with your viewpoint are right, how the poor plants ever managed back in the stone age, or Roman times, with that massive lack of CO2… how indeed did the primeval forest ever grow?
Well, griffypoo, considering that the Romans burned a LOT of oil to light their cities and villages and military camps, and they grew enough grain and livestock to feed not just the Roman Army but also the Roman citizens, and built dams, viaducts, and – oh, YEAH – the coliseum – stuff like that, as well as engineering a seaport for Rome and more seaports in other places they took over, e.g, Egypt and Ethiopia, I doubt quite sincerely that any plants were lacking in CO2. Also, the Romans used wood to heat the floors of their houses, with a space under the main flooring that provided enough room to set woodpiles and send in people to light those woodpiles in the winter.
And since CO2 is ONLY 0.04% of the atmosphere – PERIOD – any day, any time of year, your question does not make any sense. After all, Griffypoo, plants ABSORB CO2 and haven’t seemed to lack anything in that venue in several hundred million years, starting WAY BACK in the Silurian period. And it was quite tropical and warm back then, which you seem to blithely ignore…. to your detriment.
A few facts for you, Griffypoo: Plants, which had begun colonizing the land during the Silurian Period, continued to make evolutionary progress during the Devonian. Lycophytes, horsetails and ferns grew to large sizes and formed Earth’s first forests. By the end of the Devonian, progymnosperms such as Archaeopteris were the first successful trees.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/43596-devonian-period.html
Oh, and the Carboniferous period: Carboniferous terrestrial environments were dominated by vascular land plants ranging from small, shrubby growths to trees exceeding heights of 100 feet (30 metres). The most important groups were the lycopods, sphenopsids, cordaites, seed ferns, and true ferns.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/science/Carboniferous-Period/Carboniferous-life
And just to be clear: Oxygen levels back then were quite high. In fact, the O2 level was so high in the Carboniferous period that dragonflies had 3 foot wide wingspans. They were the Meganeura. Centipedes were up to 6 feet long, too….. Wanna see my centipede?????
As plants became firmly established on land, life once again had a major effect on Earth’s atmosphere during the Carboniferous Period. Oxygen made up 20 percent of the atmosphere—about today’s level—around 350 million years ago, and it rose to as much as 35 percent over the next 50 million years.
Source: https://forces.si.edu/atmosphere/02_02_06.html
Try harder, Griffypoo. And wear light reflecting clothing if you go out at night. That’s if you’re allowed to go out at night at all down there in the Land of Oz.
“Centipedes were up to 6 feet long”
There’s a nightmare for you!
Thanks for the history lesson.
it’s not down here, thank the gods, I believe it’s in the UK.
Oh Griffy – 3 things will get plants growing in abundance, as long as the other 2 of the 3 are present. They are warmth/light, CO2 and water. The Roman Empire grew during the Roman warm period (the clue is in the name). Interestingly enough, in his paleo temperature reconstruction, Michael Mann can’t tell the difference between any of those 3.
Yes, in the Roman Warm Period, the Ancient City of Rome’s major seaport was in full operation.
Today, Rome’s ancient seaport is landlocked because the sea level is lower today than it was in the Roman Warm Period. Sea level was higher then than now, because it was warmer then than now.
We are not currently experiencing unprecedented warming on Earth as the climate alarmists claim. It was warmer in the past than it is today. The Roman Warm Period is one example.
There are other Roman era ports that are currently under water. Ground movements are much, much more important than sea level changes.
Fools and their money are soon parted.
Zombie Bastiat just slashed his wrists with broken window glass.
I know a good $30 triilion investment opportunity — space-shipping the climate nuts to Mars by 2050.
Since they are so opposed to carbon, make sure not to ship anything containing carbon with them.
Hey! I just had a great idea for “carbon sequestration”: ship it all to Mars, where they won’t notice the difference at all.
What DO you have against Mars, Dusty? It would be more productive to send the to Titan to mine the hydrocarbons on that moon, wouldn’t it?
Slow boat to China (carbon neutral of course) – they can replace the Uighurs making solar panels!
If they are serious about total decarbonization of the planet then why stop Iran and North Korea from building nukes? In fact, encourage these outlaw nations to stockpile all the weapons they want then goad them into using them. Ragnarök, end of all life on Earth and no more climate change either. No more anything! Would that finally appease the Greens and CAGW clowns?
The side effects? which are nuclear armed rogue states?
Biden has already guaranteed that.
Yes, Biden has. The Mad Mullahs of Iran are said to be weeks away from being able to put together a nuclear weapon, and North Korea is said to have restarted its nuclear reactor.
Biden is a disaster, any way you look at it.
How very Victorian of you! Whenever a tribal group rose up against British rule, there always seemed to be a ‘mad mullah’ behind it – one of them of course being the mad mullah of Swat (Afghanistan). Are the Taliban to be controlled by a mad mullah? I think the mad mullah of Kandahar has a ring to it.
Iran has been ‘only weeks’ away from building a nuclear weapon for at least the last 6 years – ever since Netanyahu announced it in the US congress. We have no idea how far away they are from a weapon, or even if they have the capability to build them in the first place – the proof of how far along they are resides in Benjamin Netanyahu’s head and seemingly nowhere else.
Well, Pamela, wouldn’t THEY be dead, too? How would they subsist without their soy food groups and indoor heating, never mind running water?
I don’t think Griffypoo quite understood your intent, but don’t worry about it. He’s kinda thick, y’see.
Griffy has no need to duck – Pamela’s comment went over his head with about a thousand feet of clearance!
Sounds like a version of the broken windows theory of economic recovery, which ignores the opportunity cost of spending money on things that you didn’t need to spend money on.
It’s no good-
We can’t build our way out of the environmental crisis (msn.com)
Doomed I tell ya. We’re all doomed!
Those employed in the industrialized world, roughly 350 million, will have to bear the brunt of this cost i.e. nearly $85,000 per person. Further, there has been no cost benefit analysis and considering of unintended consequences. This is lunacy on steroids. One tenth of this amount, spent on adapting to the weather conditions, will prove a much more sensible way to go.
Each successive government pushes the green renewables because it makes them look good. These career politicians don’t care about how achievable it is or even if it works they spin the same old garbage to make them look good until they move on to make the serious money or they retire on a fat pension in warmer climes. Governments have already run out of money, it will totally bankrupt countries and the future looks even grimmer when these policies really start to bite, already in Germany hundreds of thousands are in fuel poverty. It will be the countries that invest in fossil fuel for the next 50 years that will soar ahead. This is rubber necking at a decade by decade train crash- truly unbelievable.
The Social Security managers put out a new report yesterday. Seems in the US, the Medicare trust fund will run dry somewhere around 2025, while the main Social Security trust fund will run dry around 2033, at which point payments will have to drop to about 76% of what they were. (This is because payroll taxes are still being paid, so the trust fund can spend what comes in, but no more.)
Of course the politicians won’t let that happen. They will have to either increase social security taxes by a minimum of 25%, or they are going to cap payments so that only the evil rich will lose their social security.
They could also try what Argentina did, and seize all private retirement funds and dump them into the SS trust fund. Combined with a cap on payments so that those who provided the funds won’t get any of it back.
The dreaded “haircut” solution.
faaaak!
It’s a little more ominous than that. The Social Security Administration holds markers for all the excess funds that were dumped into the general revenue pot back when 9-10 people were paying in for every 1 person collecting. They will simply present these IOU’s to the Treasury for redemption and they can go their merry way. Of course, what that does to the discretionary portion of the national budget will be very exciting, and not in a good way.
Maybe we’ll have brawls and fistfights on the floors of the House of Reps and the Senate, DJ. I would love to see that myself.
Wow!
The US actually had a proper accountable fund for social security that needs to break even? In the UK and Oz they just throw it all in a pot and spend whatever they like, as I understand it. That allows them to hide such shortfalls.
In the UK NEA (National Energy Action) estimates that 4 million households are in fuel poverty in England, Wales and N Ireland and each year around 10,000 people die as a result of living in a cold home.
The separate Energy Action Scotland says 12.4% of Scottish households are in fuel poverty.
You are so smart, you are the only person in the whole wide world who has managed to figure that out. When do you expect your next Nobel?
Yet he can’t figure out where he misspelled his own name/ID.
It is always a process of going backwards with greens. Always a regression. Little wonder the green vision of the future looks uncannily like a version of the past most of us are glad we left behind.
Statists never seem to understand the difference between what people want and what is mandated.
Who in their right mind wants to rely on breezes and sunshine for a continuous uninterruptible supply of electricity? Intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine, has not, and will not, run the economies of the world, as electricity alone is unable to support the prolific growth rates of the medical industry, military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures to meet the demands of the exploding world population.
Only healthy and wealthy countries like the USA, Germany, Australia, and the UK can subsidize electricity from breezes and sunshine, and intermittent electricity at best. The 80 percent of the 8 billion on earth living on less than 10 dollars a day cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag. Those poorer countries must rely on affordable and abundant coal for reliable electricity, while residents in the healthy and wealthier countries pay dearly for those subsidies with some of the highest cost for electricity in the world.
If they have any coal in their country…
There are a number of poorer states with neither coal, nor gas, nor oil. Importing those is prohibitively expensive.
In 74 years since WW2 coal has failed to arrive and deliver power or a grid for very large areas of the world. I don’t see why it would in the future?
and yet renewable energy is slowly, incrementally actually delivering power and improving lives.
Ummm…. Griffypoo, there’s a coal-fired plant in my county to the east of me. Still working, still cranking out power. You wanna try harder?
I’m really concerned about your lack of awareness. Perhaps you should stop living in a closeted space like a monk and go outside and enjoy the sunshine. If it’s autumn in my kingdom, you should be seeing spring flowers where you are before long.
Smooches!
Yes, I have a coal-fired powerplant just east of me, too. It’s humming right along. It worked just fine during the arctic freeze that hit the U.S. in February 2021. My electricity never went out.
Powder River Coal !
Name a country that has zero coal, oil or gas (aside from small island nations, that is), Griffy. Now think of some of those poorer countries and I bet there are very serious reasons why they don’t have huge coal-fired power plants, other than an abundance or severe lack of coal. If the countries trying to help in Africa, say, had given the people what they needed not what those countries thought they needed, then there might have been a damn sight more coal fired power plants there.
Once again, griff retreats to his “if it hasn’t happened, it can’t happen” fairy tale world.
Impoverished companies haven’t invested in power generation. In griff’s world, this proves that only wind and solar will work for those countries.
Doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but then, griff has never made the slightest bit of sense.
griff,
In July 2013 The World Bank said it would cease providing funding for greenfield coal power generation projects, except in rare circumstances.
By 2019 the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) noted that
“Today over 100 globally significant financial institutions have divested from thermal coal, including 40% of the top 40 global banks and 20 globally significant insurers” and ” One of the strongest moves came in 2015 when the world’s second largest sovereign wealth fund based in Norway stepped up its exclusion criteria and started divesting from coal.”
So effectively the rich world is saying to poorer countries that if you have coal reserves we are not going to help you use them to build your economies and improve the lives of your people.
And, oh the irony, that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built entirely from the exploitation of fossil fuel oil, says it won’t fund fossil fuel coal development!
Myth and superstition have always been just that: a great investment opportunity.
People who interchangeable use “investment” and “expense” deserve some mansplaining. People who use “investment” and “unlimited green money-pit” interchangeably deserve our contempt
Decarbonise the planet? Oxymoron much?
When I saw the headline I thought about something; we can be REALLY glad they didn’t decide to de-oxygenize the planet! There’s a lot more oxygen than there is CO2, you know, and couldn’t that be just as ‘deadly’ as carbon? I shouldn’t be giving them ideas, I guess!
Hyperoxia is not a pretty thing, is it?
Sure, right after investors gain from this problem….
India asks utilities to import coal amid short supply as demand spikes (yahoo.com)
India constantly tries to mobilise its coal mining industry to avoid imports and constantly fails.
Griffy, India’s coal industry can’t keep up with increased demand from power generation – what with expanding their existing power plants and building new ones to provide electricity for their people. And weren’t you just saying upthread that “..coal has failed to arrive and deliver power or a grid to very large areas of the world…” well India is a large area of the world and coal is delivering their power grid.
China is an even bigger “area of the world”. For that matter, every industrialized country on the planet started by using coal for power. It wasn’t until much later that oil and natural gas started to make inroads.
Because electricity demand is increasing exponentially in India as it becomes more wealthy. Got to power all those spam call, email and SMS houses somehow.
Just a minute ago you claimed that coal had never worked to power any country, and now you tell us that India is importing massive amounts of coal on top of domestic supplies to support its electricity generation. Work out which it is, mate.
Multiple posts on this site have touched on the resource constraints facing any significant deployment of Unreliables™. Your ignorance is exceeded only by your hubris.
Resource depletion is a specialty research branch of econ– that you are not trained in. For those who are trained in it and experienced, it is one of the easier ways of spotting troll arguments and their weak points. The easiest weak point of them all is “crustal abundance” and related guffaws.
Usually the great investment opportunities turn out to be good for a few after the crash.
You have to sell now to make it successful. All of you!
Or watch your money walk away.
Decarbonise the planet, where do I sign up. I have some old monopoly money…….
For perspective, total GDP of earth is around $90 trillion.
[QUOTE FROM ARTICLE]”And there are a lot of reasons to be concerned that Western governments will run short of money over the next 30 years.” [END QUOTE]
Governments will never run out of money as long as there is a convenient central bank to print it for them. But if they try to raise taxes to finance $30 trillion of useless programs to combat climate change, citizens who don’t work for the government will run out of money.
This is happening in Australia right now.
And just one of the reasons that I’m going to be an expat of Oz as well as from the UK quite shortly. Luckily most of my investments are outside of Oz.
How about my new investment opportunity to sell oxygen to people who like to breath but only virgin air uncontaminated by Trumpish exhalations. Liberals will be all over that. Also I will develop a carbon capture anti-covid face mask in the colours of the rainbow made from recycled IPCC reports of doom.
First step is to convince people that it is in short supply or running out, then convince them you can deliver what they already have and get paid for doing so. Seems legit.
I think this is the best investment opportunity I’ve seen for a long while! 🙂
“Yellow Vest protests in Europe, which started as opposition to French efforts to introduce a climate fuel tax,“
Actually, no. The tax already exists. It has existed for some time and that’s the basis for the accusation used against the protesters: “they are inept, the tax existed and nobody complained”.
The tax existed but started low, was raised, and it didn’t matter that much when oil was pretty cheap.
I’ve had car salespersons tell me that buying a car was an investment.
When I ask for them to put in a guaranteed growth value line in the contract, they shut up.
Can’t wait until we pass through the infamous 1.5°C tipping point, and when nothing happens it will be interesting to see how creative the green Cultists will be in explaining the lack of doom.
This latest green mass hysteria where normally sane and rational business men start believing in the climate emergency with the furver of an old-time Jehovah’s Witness. But at least the JWs were smart enough to stop predicting the end of the world every ten years!
I think there’s money to be made in selling US coastal property to climate skeptics (as no one else will be buying it shortly). Oh, and former presidents.
The people who are buying coastal properties are the ones involved in scaring people off of buying coastal properties. I noticed David Suzuki has a nice property on the coast, as do so very many of the alarmist cultists. Now what do they all know that you don’t, eh Griffy?
That they plan on selling it on to you guys?
It makes no sense to buy coastal property in much of the USA.
‘Renewables’ are considerably more capital-intensive than conventional generation. It seems likely that the capital requirements for solar/wind plants, and their required battery or other backup, together with the capital needed for expanded mining operations to supply the materials, will have a significant upward impact on interest rates.
There is a serious rewriting of history in this article: Malcolm Turnbull succeeded Abbott as Prime Minister on 14 September 2015, so the Paris Agreement occurred on his watch, not Abbott’s.